Daniel Kehlmann’s ‘F’

By Joseph Salvatore

Oct. 31, 2014

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CreditDavid Plunkert

One thing nearly certain about a novel whose title is merely a letter of the alphabet is that any review will probably contain what grammarians call “modals,” words that imply possibility: “This enigmatic title may refer to . . . ” or “Given the author’s many winks at the reader, such a title might. . . . ”

As with Thomas Pynchon’s “V.” or Tom McCarthy’s “C,” in Daniel Kehlmann’s subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel, readers and characters alike exist for a time in that hazy, uncertain land, where there is not only the desire but the need to solve for x — or, in Kehlmann’s case, “F” — a need to assign value, to accord meaning, to map connections, to know the mind of the creator.

Not such an easy task, either in fiction or in life, as the three Friedland brothers — Ivan, Eric and Martin — and their father, Arthur, discover in Kehlmann’s novel, translated deftly from the German by Carol Brown Janeway. As 13-year-old Ivan, an aspiring artist, notes while brooding on the mystery of art: “There was nothing about it in any book. No one to help you. No book, no teacher. You had to figure out everything important for yourself, and if you didn’t, you had failed your life’s purpose.” Eventually, after years of practice, Ivan confronts this failure head-on: “I was never going to rank as a painter. This much I now knew. I worked the same way I had before, but there was no longer any point. . . . What does it mean to be average — suddenly the question became a constant one. How do you live with that, why do you keep on going?”

Again, a philosophical query that’s not so easy to answer, either for Ivan the would-be painter or for his feckless father, Arthur the would-be writer, unemployed, unambitious and unpublished outside of a few literary journals he doesn’t count, whose wife, a wealthy eye doctor, supports him and the family financially.

When the novel opens in 1984, Arthur is taking his three teenage sons to see a sideshow hypnotist who, despite Arthur’s skepticism, coaxes him into making an effort to rise above his own mediocrity: “No matter what it costs.” That night, Arthur takes “his passport and all the money in their joint account” and sends his wife a telegram saying “they shouldn’t wait for him, he wouldn’t be coming back for a long time.” His sons will not see him again until they are adults, by which time Arthur will have become a wildly successful albeit reclusive writer. His novel “My Name Is No One,” featuring a hero called “F,” is so popular that its hopeless message — human consciousness is meaningless and none of us actually exist — inspires a spate of suicides.

Here’s Martin ruminating on his father’s indolence: “Could it be that Arthur’s answer to the question of why he had walked out on him and his mother, was that anyone who gave himself over to captivity and the restricted life, to mediocrity and despair, would be incapable of helping any other human being because he would be beyond help himself, succumbing to cancer, heart disease, his life cut short, rot invading his still-breathing body?”

The novel then jumps ahead 24 years, unspooling three elegantly intertwined chapters that make up the bulk of the book, intersecting at crucial moments, each narrated by a brother. Martin is now an obese and faithless priest, more obsessed with solving the Rubik’s cube (he’s ranked No. 22 nationally) and eating candy bars in the confessional than with confronting the mysteries of his lost faith. Ivan, having accepted his lack of original talent, is now a skilled and wealthy international art forger who rationalizes his deception by saying that “all museums are full of fakes. So what?” Finally, there is the depressed, anxious and heavily medicated Eric, Ivan’s uncannily identical twin, who is a financial fraud, bilking his clients out of millions and cheating on his wife with everyone from his secretaries to his therapist to his maid, “not in the kitchen or on my desk,” he admits, “but in the master bedroom in our marriage bed.”

Each brother’s story offers a variation on Ivan’s question — how do you live with mediocrity, why do you keep on going? — conveying the implicit message that Fate with a capital F has already decided the answer for us, the possibility for transcendence so remote as to be almost nonexistent.

Yet Kehlmann’s ambitious narrative structure — the novel itself — provides the strongest rebuke of that deterministic claim. For the novel, with its sly ­Möbius-strip-like connectedness, doesn’t just hint at the possibility of a plan behind the scenes; it enacts that plan in the very telling, its elegant, unfolding construction revealing the author’s intended pattern by book’s end; a sign of hope, perhaps, or even faith, if one chooses to interpret it that way.

The alert reader may note that each brother’s adult struggle begins with the letter F — faith, forgery, fraud — as does the name of Arthur’s protagonist. Toward the end of “F,” Arthur even reveals what the letter stands for. But by that point, given the author’s many winks at the reader, such information might be little more than a feint.

Joseph Salvatore, the author of the story collection “To Assume a Pleasing Shape,” is the book review editor for fiction and poetry at The Brooklyn Rail. He teaches writing and literature at the New School.